Category: History

We have absolutely no hope whatsoever of preventing the climatic catastrophe that is coming. Even were we to stabilise greenhouse gas production at today’s levels, the disaster would still happen. Were we to take them back to the levels of a hundred years ago – impossible anyway— it would still make no difference.

All that we might gain is a decade or two more time. However, we can decide whether our Enlightened Culture will survive, to help us rebuild, or be destroyed. But we must act quickly, for time is running out and we have given the enemy too much already.

If the Popes believed that their God intended to keep them in control of Jerusalem, or indeed, in such high esteem at home, then they were to be rudely disabused. Central to Islam is the notion that the entire world not under its control is Dar al-Harb.

The Qu’ran or Koran is the codification of messages believed by Muslims to have been received by Mohammed from the Angel Gabriel. It says a territory may exist under two conditions: Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb. These mean, roughly, ‘Land of Submission’. and ‘Land of War’.

World War Three has been much talked about in the seven decades since World War Two ended. At that time, almost all of Europe and large parts of Asia were in ruins, scourged by years of brutal, mechanised, industrial war.

Since the beginning of that peace, war has raged incessantly throughout the world. It has never stopped. The killing, the butchery, the rapes, the genocides, the ethnic cleansings. Mass rapes, murders, enslavements. Whole cities destroyed, nations impoverished or obliterated.

Has World War Three begun?

As I write, war is raging in the Middle East, in Africa, in Asia. Why? If the end of World War Two heralded in an ‘era of peace’, then why is there so much war? And how fragile is that peace?